Slashdot Mirror
Tesla Model 3 Becomes Best Selling Electric Car In World (cleantechnica.com)
Jose Pontes of EV Volumes and CleanTechnica has crunched some numbers and found that the Tesla Model 3 is now the best selling plug-in vehicle in the world. "In fact, the Model 3 was approximately 55,000 sales above the #2 BAIC EC-Series, an extremely popular Chinese model," CleanTechnica reports. "The Model 3 gobbled 7% of the plug-in vehicle market, while the #2 EC-Series and #3 Nissan LEAF each had 4%." From the report: After those top three, as the chart shows, the Tesla Model S and Model X were #4 and #5, respectively. They were followed by three Chinese models and then the Toyota Prius Prime and Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The Model 3 (and others) helped push the world plug-in vehicle share up to 2.1% in 2018. (Double that 4 times and we're at about 30% market share.) [...] Remember, 93% of plug-in vehicle sales in 2018 were not Model 3 sales. Nearly 2 million non -- Model 3 electric cars, SUVs, and crossovers made it into consumers' parking spots. Still, there's clearly a new king of the hill, and its young Tesla's 4th model.
The issue is that you don't just need a lower sale price; you also need a lower production cost. One intuitively expects these two to correlate, but at low volumes, they don't; so long as EVs are a small percentage of a manufacturer's sales, pricing is more dictated by factors such as legal compliance, trying to establish a place in the market, and maturing one's designs.
As it stands, EV profitability varies greatly between manufacturers.
The primary problem is that your base costs - batteries - are high, but your incremental costs - such as motor power - are low. A Model 3 drive unit, for example, was estimated by Munro & Associates to cost $754 - yet just the catalytic converter alone on a Prius costs more than double that. So, whether you're making some slow, plodding, econobox EV, or some lightning-speed entry-level luxury EV, the differences in production cost aren't that great. The exact same situation applies to China - battery cells are traded globally, and Chinese EV makers face the exact same challenges in making their battery packs affordable. Sure, they can cut costs on the rest of the vehicle - but you're still stuck with needing an expensive battery pack (or selling cars with poor range and charge speeds).
Thankfully, battery prices have been falling like a stone. So this situation keeps improving every year.
Anchor: "We take you now to our Chief Meteorologist, Paris Hilton." Paris: "It's hot." Anchor: "Thank you."
I agree with the AC above - what you want is a used Leaf.
Anchor: "We take you now to our Chief Meteorologist, Paris Hilton." Paris: "It's hot." Anchor: "Thank you."
Interestingly enough, this story was posted right as the first delivery of Model 3s to China is arriving in Tianjin. :) Also the second shipment to Europe will also arrive at Zeebrugge shortly.
Anchor: "We take you now to our Chief Meteorologist, Paris Hilton." Paris: "It's hot." Anchor: "Thank you."
The entire Tesla enterprise is a bet on a curve. The battery price will halve and the energy density will double every seven years. Sort of a Moore's Law for the batteries. The play book of Tesla is to find which segment of the car/suv market can be attacked at what price batteries. Roadster in 2008. S in 2012. X in 2015. 3 in 2018.
The auto industry is very mature. Almost all its parts have been refined and optimized over and over for a long time. The prices of components, crankshafts, body panels, differential gears, do not change significantly between the conception, design and production. They conditioned to think like this. "Today battery price is 200 $/kWh. The gasoline power train cost X$. Replacing it with electric would give me Y kWh battery, so... " They are not used to, "battery price to day is 190 $/kWh, four years from now it will 140$/kWh, ...". This is the mistake they made in underestimating Tesla.
Also the temperament of Elon helped. He kept making impossible to believe claims. So they discounted everything he said. Had he been a staid stiff upper lip CEO, they might have taken him more seriously and started competing with him earlier. 11 years after the Roadster, still there is no electric roadster from any competition with comparable spec. 50 kWh battery, 240 mile range, peppy two seater.
While the media circus he created kept focusing on his "failures". What he delivered in his "failures" were still stunning ground breaking trail blazing machines.
The battery era is dawning. It is getting cheaper to store 1 GWh of electricity than to build an gas burning powerplant, in the usa! In deep mines, not having to suck out the diesel exhaust pays for the conversion to battery powered earth movers!
At the price of 90 $/kWh BEV and ICEV will cost the same off the dealership, for a 300 mile range car. At that price indeterminacy of solar and wind would not be an issue. We are in for a great battery powered future.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sales are always low in January, Tesla made a huge pre-tax credit phasedown push (although they've almost completely compensated for the credit reduction via cost savings since then), and they're focusing production on European and Chinese models - not simply for the ability to sell with a much higher ASP (very high take rates on M3P, for example), but because it's quite time critical due to the trade wars (March deadline for the renewal of tariffs against China, and next week a new ruling about whether to start a 90 day countdown to impose tariffs against Europe, which would also meet with retaliatory tariffs on the auto industry). There's now 7 RORO ships out there full of Model 3s, not counting the Glovis Captain which recently unloaded at Zeebrugge.
Tesla always focuses on what's time critical. Before the US credit phasedown, that was the US. Now that it's 6 months until the next, smaller phasedown, the focus is on China and Europe.
Anchor: "We take you now to our Chief Meteorologist, Paris Hilton." Paris: "It's hot." Anchor: "Thank you."
The record.
Did I miss anything? For the past 4 years I have been reading all the above here on /. over and over and over again posted with absolute conviction any time the topic comes up. Anyone care to update or respond to the list?